Inside politics

By Rachel Sylvester

12:01AM GMT 14 Nov 2002

At a special meeting of the Cabinet in Downing Street last week, Tony Blair told his ministers that it was time for the Government to become more confident.

The first Labour term, the Prime Minister said, had been about learning the system; this one had to be about delivering change. In an unusually frank three-hour political discussion, one minister after another emphasised the importance of going further, faster in reforming the public services. "There's a new mood at No 10," one Cabinet minister said this week. "Blair's getting impatient."

This may be true. But the Queen's Speech shows just how slow and cumbersome the Government really is. Almost all the proposals announced have been trailed - many frequently - in the past.

Most have been the subject of consultation documents, reviews and pilot schemes. Many have survived far longer than the ministers who promoted them. Although the changes have been discussed so often that most voters almost certainly think that they happened long ago, only now are they beginning their meandering journey through parliament.

In fact, some of the Government's most vigorously championed proposals have not even reached this stage. Legislation on mental health, corporate manslaughter and the Civil Service did not feature in yesterday's speech. Plans for Lords reform, foxhunting and the euro were left deliberately vague.

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It is not that ministers have been inactive: the Home Office Bill, which was the centrepiece of the speech, will be the 20th piece of criminal justice legislation introduced since Labour came to power.

But the implementation of policy has been painfully slow. The proposal to change the law on double jeopardy, to allow a second prosecution to take place, has, for example, been announced repeatedly by the Government since it was first recommended by the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

In July 1999, Jack Straw asked the Law Commission to review the position relating to double jeopardy. Since then both he and his successor, David Blunkett, have committed themselves to changing the law several times. A Bill announced in the last Queen's Speech came to nothing after civil liberties campaigners complained.

The planned reforms of licensing laws have also been publicised many times. As long ago as 1998 the Government was hinting that it might be willing to introduce longer drinking hours. Last May, Mike O'Brien, then Home Office minister, even invited journalists to a pub for a press conference "announcing" the long-trailed changes. But, until now, no changes have been introduced.

The proposal to require house vendors to put together a "sellers' pack", including a survey, local authority search and draft legal contract, has been officially announced by the Government six times since 1997. There have been dozens of newspaper briefings suggesting that ministers want to "end the misery" of gazumping, as well as two consultation documents, a pilot scheme and a Bill that fell when the last general election was called.

A Government paper published in 1999 promised to "reduce delays and uncertainties" in the home-buying process, but nothing has suffered more delay and uncertainty than the policy itself. Even now, all that is being promised is a draft Bill, which officials say may lead to a new law which could possibly change the way people buy and sell houses in 2005, more than seven years after the proposal was first made.

The "new mood" of urgency at No 10 is yet to be translated into action.

This is partly the fault of the Parliamentary rules: time is wasted if Bills fall automatically at the end of each session. Whitehall, with its system for draft Bills and pilot studies, may also be a little to blame. But ministers are ultimately responsible for what happens, or does not happen in their departments.

The Cabinet agreed last week that the Government should stop over-inflating public expectations of what can be achieved in the public services and concentrate on delivering improvements instead. But nothing inflates public expectations more than repeated announcements of change, and nothing deflates the voters' opinion of politicians more than the realisation that nothing substantive has altered at all.